Dear Participant of the NC-AFM 2012 Conference,

Every year, the organizing committee of the NC-AFM Conference Series arranges for a possibility to publish results presented at the conference in a high-quality journal. The goal is that the NC-AFM community is provided annually with a collection of papers assembled in one issue that give a comprehensive overview over the current state-of-the-art of this rapidly developing field. Due to the high visibility of these Special Issues in the NC-AFM community, papers published in this series are highly cited.

In order to continue this tradition and to build on the success of the Special Issue of the NC-AFM 2011 Conference (click here for a direct link to the special issue), the organizing committee of the NC-AFM 2012 Conference has again teamed up with the Beilstein Journal of Nanotechnology. This peer-reviewed, open access journal publishes high-quality original articles on all aspects of nanoscience and nanotechnology. It provides a unique platform for rapid publication, highest visibility, and worldwide impact. We know that many of you will have reservations publishing in an open-access journal, especially if it has a short period of existence (its first issue appeared in November of 2010), but there are good reasons why we hope you will support this effort:

In recent years, many of the established scientific journals have dramatically increased their subscription fees charged to libraries and universities with the effect that many smaller institutions had to discontinue their subscriptions to select journals. For the Beilstein Journal of Nanotechnology, however, there are no fees for authors and readers and no page charges or charges for color - the journal is completely funded by the Beilstein-Institut, a German non-profit foundation, as a service to the scientific community.

Traditional open-access journals on the other hand require authors to pay often hefty page charges and are only available online, whereas the Beilstein Journal of Nanotechnology appears both online and in print for free.

While articles submitted to the NC-AFM Special Issue will be published online on an ongoing basis (i.e., no wait once your article has been accepted), Beilstein will produce a printed issue that will be sent to all conference participants. Moreover, for broadest dissemination of your results, you can provide us with additional names and addresses when you submit your article and we will send additional hardcopy issues to these individuals free of charge.

More details about the aims and scope of the Journal can be found on the Journal's web site www.bjnano.org, where you can also find the instructions for authors and a description of the submission process. Articles for the special issue can be submitted any time (please indicate in your cover letter that it is for the NC-AFM 2012 Special Issue), but the official deadline is set to two months after the conference, on Friday, September 7, 2012.

As this date is still a while off, there is no need for immediate action, but we cordially invite you to plan ahead and to submit a manuscript once the time has come. Take full advantage of true Open Access publishing to disseminate your results with maximum impact and contribute to progress in the NC-AFM community by sending us your exciting research results.